Monkey See Pictures

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Obey Kiyosaki

Uploaded 3 ½ hrs of Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad onto my Ipod. I read the book a couple of years back and gist of it was – get money to work for you. Not the other way around as we've all been taught. Creating passive income through investments in real estate and the like until you get to the point where said investments start making $$$ for you, in effect creating a phenomenon Malaysians know as "goyang kaki".

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Koontz

I love book sales. I got a copy Dean Koontz’s Forever Odd for 70% off the hardback price. FO is the sequel to the bestselling Odd Thomas. Simple engaging plot; kept me hooked till the very last page and left me bleary eyed at two in the morning.

Cant’ say as much for Life Expectancy and The Face – Koontz’s other recent works. And there's Velocity which (from reading the free pdf sampler) didn't exactly had me frothing at the mouth in anticipation - so gave it a miss.

And The Taking – War of the Worlds by way of alien fungi was pretty good for the first few chapters then everything went south. And the rushed ending was .. a bit crap.

I remember Koontz used to do great novels back in the 80s and 90s - the likes of Dark Rivers of the Heart, Mr. Murder, The Bad Place, Tick Tock, Watchers. These days he's mostly hit and miss for me. I usually read up reviews of his books on Amazon before shelling out my hard earned dollars.

Anyway FO goes on my read pile -

Lee Child’s One Shot

Peter Abrahams’ Wildest Dreams

Mark Billingham’s Burning Girl

Jeffrey Deaver’s Garden of Beasts

Kyle Mills’ Phoenix Rising

Stephen King’s DarkTower (a brick and the end of the series)

Tad Williams’ Shadow March (another brick)

Jack Canfield's Success Principles

Softwar: Larry Ellison & Oracle

Dropped Mark Billingham’s Sleepyhead couple of weeks ago. Bloody slow book that went round and round in circles, I gave up halfway through.

I am a lazy blogger

Whoa. Way behind on my blogs. Will be catching up this weekend.

Mamoru Oshii's Ghost In The Shell 2 : Innocence finally made it to NZ shores in a special 2 DVD edition with an English dub. Breathtaking visuals with a heady mix of 3D backgrounds and 2d cel shaded animation; lots of neon and rain and retro looking cars in Japan 2032, in parts very similar to Ridley Scott's Bladerunner.

Plotwise Ok though bogged down at times with some serious navel gazing and philosophical musings - characters quoting Descartes and Milton and the Holy Scriptures - which had me scratchin ye olde noggin.

But still worth repeat viewing. I particularly enjoy the gun battles between our two cops and the Yakuza (akin to a John Woo flick) and again when Batou was remotely hacked in a grocery store and his vision and hearing got seriously messed up. And dig the the jaw dropping imagery of Tokyo especially the street festival - which it is said took Mr Oshii's men a year to do.

Yup, leave it to the Japanese to get anal over these things. But damn if Ghost in the Shell 2 : Innocence isn't one big visual wankfest.